THE DOCUMENTS
This briefing covers three written CIA documents from the U.S. Department of War’s PURSUE Release 03, published at war.gov/ufo, cleared 12 June 2026. They are CIA-UAP-010, “Report on Conversations with Soviet Scientists on Subject of Unidentified Flying Objects in the USSR” (dated to May 1967); CIA-UAP-011, “The Sary Shagan Weapons Testing Range” (covering November 1972 to November 1973); and CIA-UAP-008, “Speculative Paper by N. Kardashev and A. Sakharov” (dated April 1972, on a conference held in September 1971). Each is an intelligence information report drawn from a single source and circulated without a final agency evaluation.
Why this one is worth your time
When a “CIA UFO file” surfaces, the letterhead tends to do more work than the contents support. These three documents are a useful corrective, because read together they show what the agency was actually collecting on the Soviet side of the question: not craft and not conclusions, but reporting on what Soviet scientists thought, said and saw, gathered at second hand by visiting US scientists and other sources. One file is a tour of Soviet astronomers’ opinions on UFOs in 1967; one is a weapons-range report that happens to list an unidentified aerial phenomenon among its items; one is about black-hole physics and mentions no UFO at all. This briefing sets out what each records, explains the “unevaluated information report” label they share, and notes plainly where the oldest scan is too degraded to quote.
What the documents say
What kind of documents these are. All three are CIA intelligence information reports: raw reporting from a single source, written down and circulated so that analysts elsewhere can weigh it, and each marked as not finally evaluated by the agency that filed it. None is an assessment or a conclusion. CIA-UAP-010 and CIA-UAP-008 draw on US scientists who had contact with Soviet colleagues; CIA-UAP-011 draws on a former Soviet citizen. The reports record what a source said, not what the agency confirmed.
CIA-UAP-010, the 1967 conversations. The document records an account, extracted from a memorandum written by a US astrophysicist for his superiors, of conversations held during a one-month trip through the USSR in the spring of 1967 to visit astronomical observatories engaged in planetary research. UFO inquiries, the report states, were a minor aspect of the trip. It then summarises, observatory by observatory, what Soviet astronomers said. At the Sternberg Institute in Moscow one scientist was noncommittal and a radio astronomer said he knew of no Soviet sightings. At Pulkovo, near Leningrad, an astronomer had heard of sightings near the Caucasus but knew of no study of them. The report gives most space to N.A. Kozyrev, described as very interested in the problem, who had read Donald Menzel’s sceptical book but did not accept its conclusions, knew of sightings in the northern USSR, and whose personal opinion the report records as being that UFOs may originate on Venus. At observatories in Kiev and Crimea the document records a group of astronomers, including I.K. Koval and L.J. Galkin, who had seen a curious reddish object flashing through the sky one evening; their own immediate interpretation, the report says, was that it might have been a fragment of a satellite or rocket burning up in the atmosphere, though one of them was struck by the possibility that it had been a “saucer.” At the Astrophysical Institute in Alma Ata the director G.M. Idlis initially considered the subject closed but, after hearing of James McDonald’s critical study, conceded that it was “clearly still an open question.” The report also records a case of repeated “ball lightning” sightings in northern Kazakhstan that a university team traced to reflections of automobile headlights from an inversion layer. Its closing observation is that no official treatment of the UFO problem had been given in the USSR and that Soviet scientists tended to cite US work, principally Menzel’s book, to demonstrate the absence of a real scientific problem.
CIA-UAP-011, the Sary Shagan report. This is an information report from a former Soviet citizen on the Sary Shagan weapons testing range, covering November 1972 to November 1973. Its own summary describes it as providing limited information on the range: facilities, work areas, security fencing, a regional headquarters and a warhead checkout unit, two named missile-warhead systems, rumoured laser research, and, as the last item in the list, an unidentified aerial phenomenon. The unidentified phenomenon is one entry in a wider report about a Soviet weapons facility, not the document’s subject. The portion of the scan describing the phenomenon itself is degraded and is not reconstructed here.
CIA-UAP-008, the Kardashev and Sakharov paper. This report contains no UFO material. It consists of edited abstracts from a letter by a colleague who attended the Conference on the Origins of Life in Yerevan, Armenia, in September 1971, and it concerns a speculative physics paper read there by N.S. Kardashev of the Institute for Space Research in Moscow, co-authored with the physicist Andrei D. Sakharov. The paper, the report says, considered what happens when a charged mass collapses in space: where an uncharged mass would collapse past the point of gravitational singularity and be gone, a charged mass might “bounce” back out into a different part of space-time. The report records that a US attendee found the speculation a little fantastic but believed the paper was grounded in sound physics. It is included here because it is part of the same body of CIA reporting on Soviet scientists, gathered through US scientists attending Soviet conferences, in which the UFO conversations of CIA-UAP-010 also sit.
What the documents do not say
They do not say what any object was. CIA-UAP-010 is a report of opinions and second-hand accounts, not of a sighting the author witnessed; the one reddish object it describes was, on the witnesses’ own immediate reading, a possible satellite or rocket fragment. CIA-UAP-011 lists an unidentified aerial phenomenon but, in the legible portion, supplies no description of it. None of the three offers an agency judgement on any object.
They are single-source and unevaluated. Each is an information report from one source, marked as not finally evaluated. CIA-UAP-010 and CIA-UAP-008 reach the agency at one remove, through US scientists reporting what Soviet colleagues said or presented; CIA-UAP-011 rests on a single former Soviet citizen’s account.
CIA-UAP-008 records no UFO observation at all. It concerns theoretical astrophysics. Its relevance here is as an example of the reporting stream, not as a UFO report.
One of the three is a degraded scan. CIA-UAP-010 survives as a poor-quality image: the page is broadly legible by eye, but the machine-extracted text is corrupted in places, including in the header fields. This briefing summarises its contents from the legible text and quotes only fragments that can be read with confidence.
From the record
the possibility that the object might have been a “saucer.” CIA-UAP-010, on one astronomer’s reaction to the reddish object seen near Kiev
was “clearly still an open question.” CIA-UAP-010, the Alma Ata director’s conclusion after hearing of a critical US study
Intelligence Information Report The report-type header on CIA-UAP-008
Where the case connects
These three files sit alongside the other CIA Soviet material in the PURSUE releases. Release 02’s first CIA file, CIA-UAP-D001, is also a Soviet observation, a single 1973 report of a green object over the USSR, and is covered in Release 02 Briefing 4; like the files here it is a raw, unevaluated information report in which a source describes something and the agency draws no conclusion. The recurrence of colour in these reports, the green object of CIA-UAP-D001 and the reddish object near Kiev here, can be set against Release 02 Briefing 3 on the green fireballs of New Mexico, where colour and repetition are the through-line; the documents themselves draw no link between these cases. Briefing 1 of Release 01 covers PURSUE and the tier system.
The files also leave their own loose ends. CIA-UAP-010 names many Soviet scientists and their opinions but reports no sighting the author saw and reaches no finding. CIA-UAP-011 lists an unidentified aerial phenomenon whose description, in the surviving scan, is not legible. CIA-UAP-008 connects to the others only as a sample of the same collection stream, not by subject. Any later tranche that releases the legible Sary Shagan passage, a cleaner scan of the 1967 report, or a CIA assessment of any of this reporting, lands in this series when it does.
Read it yourself
CIA-UAP-010, “Report on Conversations with Soviet Scientists on Subject of Unidentified Flying Objects in the USSR”; CIA-UAP-011, “The Sary Shagan Weapons Testing Range”; and CIA-UAP-008, “Speculative Paper by N. Kardashev and A. Sakharov”, are hosted at war.gov in PURSUE Release 03.
Read the files. Decide for yourself.
Related wiki entries
The wiki entries below give background on the programme and the publisher behind this briefing.
References and further reading
- Primary document: CIA-UAP-010, “Report on Conversations with Soviet Scientists on Subject of Unidentified Flying Objects in the USSR”, PURSUE Release 03, U.S. Department of War, hosted at war.gov/ufo
- Primary document: CIA-UAP-011, “The Sary Shagan Weapons Testing Range”, PURSUE Release 03, U.S. Department of War, hosted at war.gov/ufo
- Primary document: CIA-UAP-008, “Speculative Paper by N. Kardashev and A. Sakharov”, PURSUE Release 03, U.S. Department of War, hosted at war.gov/ufo
- Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, U.S. Department of War, war.gov/ufo
- AARO UAP Records, All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, aaro.mil/UAP-Records
- Release 02 Briefing 4, on CIA-UAP-D001, the first CIA file and a 1973 Soviet observation
- Release 02 Briefing 3, on the green fireballs of New Mexico
- Briefing 1 of Release 01, on PURSUE and the evidence tier system